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Ervin Baktay, the Indologist Indian

A “playful man”: the painter, writer, Indologist, geographer, astrologist, museologist, art historian and Indian. The exhibition on Ervin Baktay is now open in the Ferenc Hopp Museum in Budapest.

This exhibition in the Ferenc Hopp Museum depicts Baktay’s manifold personality and his family’s, partly unknown, history. This history illustrates how this and many other similar landowner families acquired the lifestyle and values of the urban middle class in the second half of the 19^th century. The Baktay paintings on display, along with those of some friends, give the visitor a rare overview of the so-called Munich-school, a group of painters inspired by the great Hungarian painter Simon Hollósy. The visitors can also discover the libertine atmosphere of the Greco-Roman symposions held in the puppeteer, Blatter Géza’s workshop in the early 1920’s. Baktay, under the pseudonym Eroinos Baktaios, was one of the leading figures of these sessions.

Through Baktay’s personal environment (his study and his library) and his works, the exhibition sheds light on Baktay’s multidisciplinary oeuvre as well as on his role in the Hungarian Geographical Society and in popularising Sándor Kőrösi Csoma’s scientific achievement. His filmstrip “India” (1956) and a radio lecture on his travels in the western part of Tibet brings his unique personality even closer to the visitor.

In terms of objects, the ones collected in western Tibet are as fascinating as beautiful, and are complemented with further pieces from the Indian and Nepali collection of the museum, many of which were also exhibited in the first comprehensive India exhibition in Hungary curated by Baktay in 1951.

As for Baktay’s North American Indian drive, the exhibition displays some hilarious photos and relics of an imaginary western town and Indian tribe near the Danube where Baktay himself was the sheriff, this time using another pseudonym, E. H. Bucktye. The two silent western movies directed by Baktay are highly entertaining even for the contemporary visitor.